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In our imagination, eastern Europe was always black and white. Traveling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colorful western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn't remember having seen any color, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker's experiments with color only reinforced our image of the east as gray. Europe clearly had an ideologically motivated neurosis when it came to the perception of color.

The reader of The Seropositive Ball has been added to the Tactical Media Files as a freely downloadable pdf. The Seropostive Ball was a 69-hour 'networked event' staged at Amsterdam's Paradiso June 21-24, 1990, and a shadow conference to the World AIDS Conference in San Francisco. The event was an important precursor for the first Next 5 Minutes festival on Tactical Television (1993). This exceptional document deserves special attention, hence this non-standard announcement. (TMF editors)

The Seropositive Ball was a networked event that lasted 69 hours
non-stop. It was a shadow conference to the World AIDS Conference, which
was held the same days in San Francisco. Because people with HIV and
AIDS were not welcome in the USA, both the Paradiso gathering as well as
the especially designed 0+net offered a way to show commitment, share
feelings and insights, exchange knowledge and art and express political
views for many people involved.

Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive
attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical,
innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics
as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the
creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user
language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective
activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist,
theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and
categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of
user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an
important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with
a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this
sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of
anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of
tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream
values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even
between people who are creative and those that are not.

VakuumTV was founded in February 1994 on the initiative of László
Kistamás. Its members presented weekly broadcasts on Monday nights at
the most popular cultural club in Budapest, Tilos az Á. Needless to
say, the designation 'VakuumTV' was not meant to refer to any kind of
conventional television channel which could be received on TV sets in
commercial circulation. Rather, its founders envisioned a live show in
which a large frame separating the stage from the audience imitates the
experience of watching TV for the audience. Thus VakuumTV can be
received only where this frame is set up.

When thinking about dead bodies on the beach, these days most people think of refugees whose boats sank during the dangerous sea crossing to the European Union. The number of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015 is the highest ever, reaching 2,500. The killing of these men and women can effectively be seen as a direct – and deliberate – act of EU policy, making the border between Northern Africa and Europe the deadliest in the world.

The photographic series "Stranded" shows men lying motionless on an empty beach. But unlike refugees these men wear business suits, the standardized clothing of politicians and managers. Their bodies are partly in the water, partly on the beach; they appear to be stranded.

International public seminar and evening screening program on the recent outbursts of social protest and their media strategies, hosted by De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam, Friday September 30, 2011.

This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder
Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the
Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations
behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as
a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with
social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical
Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also
introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about
locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects.
Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool's
functioning, is discussed in a context of Inter-American
Transcendentalism.

®TMark is an artist and activist collective, founded in 1991. ®TMark
apprpriates the corporate veil by organising itself as a corporation.
Through the ®TMark Mutual Fund System
the collectiove has executed a series of "corporate subversion
projects", suing the legal displacements reserved for corporations for
anti-corporate activism.